WHEN Carl Minns's mobile phone rang mid-morning on Thursday the voice on the other end had an urgent message. "Stop speaking out," it said. "It's unhelpful."
The "request", which had emanated from a civil servant and was being relayed to Minns by one of his own staff, did not unduly surprise the Hull city council leader.
After all, he had just gone on national radio to accuse the government of, in effect, standing by while the city struggled with what was fast becoming a humanitarian disaster. Thousands were homeless after the worst flooding Hull had seen and the cost was spiralling past £1 billion, yet the response from the capital had been strangely muted. "Forgotten", said the headlines in that day's newspapers.
But despite the evident embarrassment his outspokenness was causing the government, Minns had no intention of being silenced. "I said that I would stop speaking out once we have got what we need," he said, recalling the phone call.
Minns's intransigence was to be well rewarded, for behind the scenes Hull's crisis had, finally, caught the right people's attention.
Advertisement
By Thursday the new prime minister and his closest advisers had begun to realise that the situation in Humberside, where a fifth of the population had been hit by the floods 10 days earlier, was getting worse rather than better.
Lurking on the near horizon, and adding to their undoubted humanitarian concerns, was also the burgeoning black cloud of a public relations disaster. It was as if Britain's own version of Hurricane Katrina had taken place and, in the same way that the US government had overlooked the plight of New Orleans, now Hull failed to register on the radar of a government preoccupied with other issues.
The next morning Minns took another phone call, this time from Gordon Brown. It was the second call Minns had from the prime minister last week.
Brown rang him first on Tuesday offering sympathy for the family of Mike Barnett, who died after his foot became lodged in a drain, and bland assurances that the "relevant departments" within Whitehall would be informed of Minns's concerns about the scale of the problem and the need for urgent aid.
That had been followed two days later by a visit from John Healey, the new communities minister, who, Minns said, made the right noises but promised nothing tangible.
Advertisement
This time, however, the tone of the conversation between Brown and Minns was different. "He asked me how the relief fund that we have set up was going, inquired how he could amend the formula for allocating emergency funding to help us and said he would visit Hull 'in the near future'," said Minns. "I had a whiff that the tide had turned."
Yesterday Brown cleared his diary to tour the stricken city and pledge financial help to its people, thus completing a remarkable turnaround in the government's attitude.
"At the start of the week I don't think the government was aware of the scale of the problem or the feeling of people in Yorkshire," Minns said.
"On Thursday I think they realised just how bad it was. And then they realised that holding the line they had was politically untenable."
Government insiders maintain they were not slow in responding to the situation in Hull, but that it was the responsibility of the Environment Agency to have been better prepared.
Advertisement
"In terms of the lessons learnt, we need to have better long-term planning in terms of flood responses. That is where the bulk of the new money we have announced is going to go," a government source said. "We also need to put pressure on the insurance industry to make sure that everyone affected is properly covered."
Just how dire the situation is for Hull's populace is not immediately evident to the casual observer. The flood waters, brought on by a month's worth of rain falling in just one hour, have long since subsided from the terraced streets and council estates, yet their legacy is proving devastating.
About 17,000 homes have been affected, with at least 5,000 people in "severe need" of help. Nearly all the city's schools have been damaged and the repair bill for them alone could top £100m, with the council's total bill likely to be double that figure. Most of the flooded homes are uninhabitable, and the insurance liability for Hull and the rest of Yorkshire is estimated at £1.5 billion. Many residents had no insurance cover.
For a city that has long been an economic blackspot and site of deprivation, with double the national rate of unemployment, the bill cannot be met without massive financial help. By Friday night the relief fund set up by the council had collected just £50,000 in donations.
A combination of being built on a flood plain, a heavy clay soil bed that acts like a sponge, and the unprecedented deluge, meant that Hull, home to more than 250,000 people, has fared even worse than the rest of the affected areas in Yorkshire. Rumours of blocked drains, the legacy of council cutbacks, also continue to swirl but Minns said he had found no evidence to substantiate the allegation. A full inquiry into the causes of the flood is under way.
Advertisement
Meanwhile the resignation of the city's struggling residents is palpable, as is their bitterness at the lack of help.
Simon Popplewell spent his 36th birthday on Friday throwing some of his most prized possessions on to the driveway of his house in west Hull.
Popplewell, a toolmaker, his wife Angela and their seven-year-old daughter Rebecca were rescued by firemen with a raft after their cul-de-sac was flooded two weeks ago.
Now, like many households around the city, the frontage of his gabled home is littered with the former contents of his living room as he clears out for the council's collectors. All the furnishings have gone, the carpets stripped and all electrical appliances junked. Even his prized Yamaha R1 motorbike is a casualty, having been submerged in the garage.
The Popplewells went to bed on Monday June 25 with the water lapping at their driveway. By the early hours, it had breached their living room.
Advertisement
"Outside the water came up to my chest. It was disgustingly brown and dirty, with fish swimming in it," Popplewell said. "There was sewage in it, we think. Since we came back we've been disinfecting like crazy. There were earwigs crawling round the furniture.
"We'd only been here a year," he said of his detached home - one of a cluster of "executive" homes in the close. "It was our dream house, and now it's ruined."
Other families have been even less fortunate. Mandy and Chris Ehlert from Hessle to the west of the city, discovered they lacked contents insurance for their rented house.
"It expired in May. They didn't send me a reminder and I forgot," said Mrs Ehlert, the part-time manager of an off-licence.
Now they and their children Abbie, 15, Sam, 12, and Beth, 5, are staying with different relatives. Ehlert said: "The landlords of the house say they can't rehouse us until their insurers give them the go-ahead and nor can we move back in until they've had the okay to pay for the clean-up. We are left in limbo. There should be some help from the government. We are quick to help other countries that have problems but what about us?"
Next door, Shelly Chearnan, 52, is watching her brother rip out the cypress bushes in her front garden before concreting it over. "The insurers are bringing me a caravan next week and we will have to put it here," she explained.
"I had to lose my temper to get it. Getting anywhere with them has been a real struggle. They are nice to your face but they are not doing anything." She has been living in a hotel, but the recent scavenging and looting means she will be happier camping out on her own doorstep, she said.
Ellie Lamb's council house isa wreck and she has no home insurance. As a 40-year-old single mother of three boys under the age of 15 and with another son getting married in a fortnight having returned from army duty in Iraq, she has every reason to be upset.
Living in Bransholme, a sprawling and windswept council estate to the northeast of Hull, she and her family were among those worst hit by the floods. She and Matthew, 14, and 12-year-old twins Aaron and Mark had to sleep on chairs with hundreds of others at city hall until the flood abated.
Now she has returned to the house to find it barely habitable, with no appliances functioning and a watermark running round the kitchen. To top it off, Yorkshire Water, whose nearby pumping station broke down during the flood, has sent a letter saying she is to be taken to court unless she pays £389 arrears.
On Friday a council officer ordered her to switch off her one functioning convenience, her cooker's gas rings, for "safety reasons". "I want to cry but I just laugh instead," she said, stripping the wood from a ruined kitchen cabinet to "keep busy".
It will take more than a sanguine outlook to put the city back on its feet, however.
"This has set back Hull years," said Minns. "Though the worst of the flood is over, we still need an army of people to help us."
Brown promises £14m but total bill may reach £1.5 billion
After the deluge, the prime minister. Gordon Brown took a tour yesterday of the northern Labour heartlands of Doncaster and Hull that a week ago were under several feet of water - and promised £14m in aid to get people "back on their feet as soon as possible".
It was criticised as too little, too late. Hull, now described as the "forgotten city", estimates its damaged schools alone need up to £100m.
In Toll Bar, the Doncaster village devastated by the flooding, Brown was shown around the home of Marc Birkby, 48, who estimates that repairs to his house will cost £35,000.
The aid package includes £10m for local authorities for recovery work, £3m to help to repair roads and bridges and £1m to help families replace essential household items.
Insurers are bracing themselves for claims from 27,500 homes and 7,000 businesses that could total £1.5 billion.